Wellington High School meant the world to Mair

By Dan MacArthur
North Forty News

Wellington's beloved high school still lives nearly 40 years after its demise thanks to one of the town's brightest lights and biggest boosters.

If his health allows, Andy Mair hopes to join his fellow alumni in August to renew friendships and reminisce about the time when the town proudly embraced its very own high school. Built in 1926, it was closed in 1964 and later demolished to make room for Wellington Junior High School.

"The best education a person ever got in high school was given there," proclaimed Mair, still confident and commanding although at 95 his eyesight is shot.

Combined with his fierce determination, that quality education propelled Mair on an exhilarating career. In the service of six presidents, he has been appointed to a series of high-profile postings both domestically and internationally--traveling to an untold number of countries across the globe.

But throughout his adventurous life, Mair has remained rooted to the place where it all started.

"I'm just a sugar beet farmer from Wellington," Mair insisted.

Mair's folks, parents of eight children, moved to Wellington in 1919 and bought a farm north of town. It was an arduous existence with few comforts. But Mair, in a 2002 North Forty News article, related one lighter moment when he teamed up with schoolmate and future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Byron White to topple outhouses on Halloween.

Mair, too, took up farming after graduating from high school in 1931. He proved successful enough to support his wife and two daughters while earning a college degree.

In 1943, Mair was elected president of the Larimer County Farm Bureau - the beginning of a 65-year relationship with the organization that fed his career and fueled his travel. By the end of his term three years later, membership had grown from the dozen charter members to 500.

His success in that endeavor opened the door to a calling that would carry Mair around the world. His full life is documented in a fat album containing photos and correspondence. There's a shot of him shaking hands with Pope Paul VI, another of him greeting John and Jackie Kennedy at the Rome airport and another grip-and-grin with Ronald Reagan. All the presidents are represented save for Lyndon Johnson, whom Mair equates with the view from the seat of a horse-drawn carriage.

In 1949 Mair joined the Colorado Farm Bureau as its state organizational director and met not-yet president Dwight Eisenhower. After his election, Eisenhower in 1953 appointed Mair to a position in the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Denver office of conservation and stabilization. Six years later Mair was appointed the USDA attaché to the U.S. Embassy in the Netherlands.

Then in 1961, a colleague he bumped into at the grocery store urged Mair to transfer to the state department. He did and promptly was assigned as administrative officer at the embassy in Rome.

Mair said he recalls asking his wife, Norma, "What in the world have we gotten ourselves into?" It indeed turned out to be pretty much the entire world.

During the Kennedy visit, Mair was responsible for carrying the first lady's bags, as he likes to put it, and making her travel arrangements. Daughter Carolyn Cady of Windsor said her father told her that Jackie tasked him with yet another assignment of keeping her out of the public eye. It was a diplomatic skill that proved helpful when Mair later stealthily escorted Justice White into the high school alumni reunions beneath the news media's radar.

Mair next was tapped in 1964 to help build the new U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan. The demanding assignment earned him the state department's highest honor. Mair recalled that it was a good time to build because a favorable exchange rate meant steel could be purchased cheaply from neighboring countries. Mair said customs officials refused to allow a load to cross the border, but relented only after he threatened to carry the material over a piece at a time under the privilege of his diplomatic passport.

From there he spent a short time at the U.S. embassy in Ankara, Turkey, before being appointed in 1969 as deputy assistant secretary for international affairs and commodity programs. It was a position in which he traveled the world applying his knowledge about improving worldwide food supplies and distribution. In that capacity he also served as the U.S. representative to the United Nations Conference for the World Food Program.

In 1973, Mair became coordinator of the Food for Peace program, an effort he speaks of perhaps most affectionately. "It was a marvelous, marvelous job," said Mair, who was responsible for distributing hundreds of millions of dollars in food to developing nations across the world.

Mair remained active in the Farm Bureau after his retirement from the government in 1975. He accompanied directors on a tour of European capitals and another group on a tour of China. He was hired again by the Farm Bureau in 1978 to escort Chinese and Soviet officials on U.S. tours and the bureau's executive committee to the Soviet Union.

In 1979 he was appointed staff assistant to the Commission on World Hunger. The following year another casual conversation with a future president earned him a position as an agricultural adviser to the Reagan-Bush campaign in 1980.

In the intervening years, Mair has continued to promote international trade by hosting trade missions, advising the USDA Commission on Security and Economics Assistance, and inspecting famine areas and refugee camps in Kenya, Ethiopia and Sudan. As recently as 2001 he traveled to Cuba with Colorado Division of Agriculture officials in an effort to facilitate trade.

But beyond all the awards, achievements and joys of a rich life well lived, Mair said his heart remains in Wellington.

"He talks about Wellington all the time," said Ed Rice, himself a product of Wellington pioneers and longtime retired principal of the town's junior high school.

"He's got a reputation as a doer," Rice continued, noting that Mair played a key role in organizing Wellington's centennial celebration in 2005.

"It's always been a coming-home for him," confirmed daughter Peggy Klinkerman of LaJunta. "He has always been proud of his Wellington heritage and felt like he got a great education there."